I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn't – Sohaila Abdulali

[Blue]

Found this article.  Worth the read.



I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn’t

By Sohaila Abdulai (New York Times)
January 7, 2013

Thirty-two years ago, when I was 17 and living in Bombay, I was gang raped and nearly killed. Three years later, outraged at the silence and misconceptions around rape, I wrote a fiery essay under my own name describing my experience for an Indian women’s magazine. It created a stir in the women’s movement — and in my family — and then it quietly disappeared. Then, last week, I looked at my e-mail and there it was. As part of the outpouring of public rage after a young woman’s rape and death in Delhi, somebody posted the article online and it went viral. Since then, I have received a deluge of messages from people expressing their support.

It’s not exactly pleasant to be a symbol of rape. I’m not an expert, nor do I represent all victims of rape. All I can offer is that — unlike the young woman who died in December two weeks after being brutally gang raped, and so many others — my story didn’t end, and I can continue to tell it.

When I fought to live that night, I hardly knew what I was fighting for. A male friend and I had gone for a walk up a mountain near my home. Four armed men caught us and made us climb to a secluded spot, where they raped me for several hours, and beat both of us. They argued among themselves about whether or not to kill us, and finally let us go.

At 17, I was just a child. Life rewarded me richly for surviving. I stumbled home, wounded and traumatized, to a fabulous family. With them on my side, so much came my way. I found true love. I wrote books. I saw a kangaroo in the wild. I caught buses and missed trains. I had a shining child. The century changed. My first gray hair appeared.

Too many others will never experience that. They will not see that it gets better, that the day comes when one incident is no longer the central focus of your life. One day you find you are no longer looking behind you, expecting every group of men to attack. One day you wind a scarf around your throat without having a flashback to being choked. One day you are not frightened anymore.

Rape is horrible. But it is not horrible for all the reasons that have been drilled into the heads of Indian women. It is horrible because you are violated, you are scared, someone else takes control of your body and hurts you in the most intimate way. It is not horrible because you lose your “virtue.” It is not horrible because your father and your brother are dishonored. I reject the notion that my virtue is located in my vagina, just as I reject the notion that men’s brains are in their genitals.

If we take honor out of the equation, rape will still be horrible, but it will be a personal, and not a societal, horror. We will be able to give women who have been assaulted what they truly need: not a load of rubbish about how they should feel guilty or ashamed, but empathy for going through a terrible trauma.

The week after I was attacked, I heard the story of a woman who was raped in a nearby suburb. She came home, went into the kitchen, set herself on fire and died. The person who told me the story was full of admiration for her selflessness in preserving her husband’s honor. Thanks to my parents, I never did understand this.

The law has to provide real penalties for rapists and protection for victims, but only families and communities can provide this empathy and support. How will a teenager participate in the prosecution of her rapist if her family isn’t behind her? How will a wife charge her assailant if her husband thinks the attack was more of an affront to him than a violation of her?

At 17, I thought the scariest thing that could happen in my life was being hurt and humiliated in such a painful way. At 49, I know I was wrong: the scariest thing is imagining my 11-year-old child being hurt and humiliated. Not because of my family’s honor, but because she trusts the world and it is infinitely painful to think of her losing that trust. When I look back, it is not the 17-year-old me I want to comfort, but my parents. They had the job of picking up the pieces.

This is where our work lies, with those of us who are raising the next generation. It lies in teaching our sons and daughters to become liberated, respectful adults who know that men who hurt women are making a choice, and will be punished.

When I was 17, I could not have imagined thousands of people marching against rape in India, as we have seen these past few weeks. And yet there is still work to be done. We have spent generations constructing elaborate systems of patriarchy, caste and social and sexual inequality that allow abuse to flourish. But rape is not inevitable, like the weather. We need to shelve all the gibberish about honor and virtue and did-she-lead-him-on and could-he-help-himself. We need to put responsibility where it lies: on men who violate women, and on all of us who let them get away with it while we point accusing fingers at their victims.

source - http://www.survivorsforjustice.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1752:i-was-wounded-my-honor-wasnt&catid=2:news&Itemid=57

[Blue]

"This article is one contribution towards exploding the silence and the comfortable myths which we build up to convince ourselves we are not potential victims, thus consigning actual victims to the most agonizing isolation a human being can know" ~ S. Abdulali

http://aglasem.com/theurge/i-fought-for-my-life-and-won-sohaila-abdulali/

[Belle]

Rape is one of the hardest things a female can recover from whether she is a child, adolcent or adult. Even if she physically recovers, most times she will be mentally damaged, never completely healing- memories still racing through her head, feeling the moment as if it were presently occurring- never trusting- paranoia is now apart of her either covertly or overtly. Always maintaining a safe distance- always hoping to be invisibale, never wanting attention- so that no one can hurt her- plastering festering wounds with fake smiles. Trying to make it through each day- hoping that each day lived will put some distance between her and the ordeal- always hoping to make a full recovery.
No, not all women are strong enough to live through such an ordeal and if they are not strong, who can blame them?

Now, rape is not only restricted to females but also to males.

 

[Nakandi]

Rape is one of the hardest things a female can recover from whether she is a child, adolcent or adult. Even if she physically recovers, most times she will be mentally damaged, never completely healing-

This reply is based on my experience in dealing with rape and is in no way meant to reduce or trivialise other person's experiences.

I am of the view that the way we are taught to think about things has a direct impact/influence on the outcome. There is a strong idea that sexualised abuse is somewhat more traumatic than any other form of abuse. Why is this? 

Some do not suffer in any way differently from their memories of sexualised physical abuse than they do from other forms, which they may sustain over a lifelong period. There is some kind of consensus that the former is much more traumatising. I went along with that idea for a while until I realised some people’s experience fell out of that theory. I found myself second guessing how to deal with those experiences, so I allowed myself the idea of mental damage Belle mentioned. My feelings and experiences about rape did not match what the wider (Western) society was saying rape victimhood would feel like.

Not feeling a lifelong victimhood to sexualised abuse did not in anyway erase the events. Neither does it take away the fact that someone did something against someone’s will. On sharing my experiences about dealing with rape, I was told that the victim had probably numbed down their feelings. I think this has root in ideas like Belle presented, which I disagree with.

People do not have to be scarred for life from any kind of abuse including rape, they can and often do live very productive lives while being more cautious and less trusting in general.

[Blue]

I agree Kiwnak, when you say people do not have to be scarred for life.  (Self)Perception however is often shaped by external forces and the ability to heal effectively from any trauma affected by the influences of one's milieu.  I believe that social conditioning thru mediums like religion which place a (false) premium on a woman's sexual "virtue" acts to the detriment of the individual when she falls prey to sexual crimes and not merely on a personal level.  Victims are often put on trial in the court of public opinion, what did she wear, how did she act, her character picked apart and in the process, she gets victimised several times over by the social stigmatisation/backlash.   There is not many a social culture that allows for a rape victim to be simply viewed as such - a victim of a heinous crime.  Consider that a woman who has been shot or stabbed will often more automatically be accepted as the victim of a crime than a rape victim who is often put in the position of having to justify her trauma.  The crime in of itself is bad enough but the communal reaction often provides a more dramatic backdrop for such a crime and often influences the healing of the individual negatively.